The Art and History Museum of Geneva once showed some 18th century chairs of the local "bonne femme" style which prevailed in Geneva and the Franche-Comté. Some time later the curators apparently considered these chairs too humble and replaced them by some elegant Parisian chairs of the same period. The local "bonne femme" furniture which is much more interesting than the ubiquitous Parisian models disappeared in storage.

Many museums are black holes which have swallowed incredible quantities of works of art, most of which disappear forever in storage, never to be seen by the public. Miles and miles of shelves full of often poorly identified artefacts constitute the invisible part of the iceberg, only the top of which is considered  "the museum".  Young and inexperienced art historians are often baffled and overwhelmed by the variety of treasures they find hidden in basements and storage sheds, and may even need the advice of an experienced private collector to identify objects.  For the trade, selling to a museum may mean saying goodbye to an object probably never to surface again.

This is only one of the many problems afflicting museums. Museums were conceived and are still managed for the precious few cognoscenti, not for the masses of tourists following the lure of famous brand names. Francesco Antinucci explores the shortcomings of museums today.

--ed

 

italiano

The 'exclusivity' of museums and the hegemony of curators. The Italian case 

by Francesco Antinucci

   The situation of the museums in Italy is very different from that in the rest of Europe, and this is due to historical reasons of various nature (many of which are mirrored by the improper expression “the country with the richest cultural heritage in the world”).

   In the other countries the works of art are far fewer and gathered in a dozen or so of historic museums – not to mention the enormous difference existing between the number and richness of the archaeological sites in Italy compared to the rest of Europe.

        • People choose the museums according to their name, not to their content
           
        • The specific value of cultural assets lies in their being bearers of culture and vehicles for the building of the cultural identity
           
        • The exhibition structure of a museum is designed to allow the critical study of the works of art, not the understanding of their communicative message

   Though to the majority of people the state of affairs of Italian museums (using the term in a broad sense, to include monuments, painting and sculpture galleries, archaeological sites, and so on) appears to be very prosperous, showing in the last fifteeen years an average increase in the number of visitors of 3.5% per year, when we take a closer look at it, we see that this success is only superficial, hiding a situation that is rather critical.

   The telltale sign of this state of affairs is the distribution of the rising tide of visitors. Some figures will help us to clarify the point. Of the approximately 40 million people who in 2013 visited the 423 Italian state museums, a half crowded into only 11 of the museums.

   This means that 50% of visitors were absorbed by 5% of the museums, while 412 museums had to share the other half of the public. And this is not all. Three quarters of all visitors – approximately 30 million people – were distributed among only 36 museums (that is, 8% of the total).

   Finally, 90% of all the visitors were distributed among 99 museums, 23% of the total. This means that less than a quarter of the Italian state museums absorbed almost all the visitors, while 324 museums (423 – 99) had virtually no public.

   Things look even more drastic if we consider all the Italian museums, and not only the state ones. Thus, the overall picture is of 4588 museums (more than ten times the number of the state ones) with 104 million visitors.

   Here, 43.3% of the visitors were absorbed by the first 36 museums, which amounts to less than 1% of the total (to be exact, they are 0.8%). A 69% of the public visited 3.6% of the museums and 92% – once again, almost all of the public – visited 22% of the museums, which leaves 3579 museums virtually without visitors.

   The dimension of this concentration is so vast that it appears immediately clear it cannot have any 'objective' cause. In other words, it cannot lie in the nature, the quality or the quantity of the artefacts of the different museums. To use the language of economics, it is a scenario of oligopoly: a few manufacturers/suppliers seize the majority of the demand and leave the several other manufacturers/suppliers only marginal shares of it.

   There are many reasons why a market gives rise to an oligopolistic condition, one of which is particularly interesting for our discussion. I am referring to the phenomenon of 'branding', when the success of an item is determined not so much by its material constitution, but by its 'name'.

   The markets characterised by 'designer' articles, like those of sport brands, from t-shirts to shoes and equipment (skis, bikes, etc.) are typical examples: the product differences existing between articles belonging to the same category are small (if not minimal) and definitely not proportional to the difference in their demands and resulting success, which, on the contrary, is huge.

   In short, all this occurs because people choose the name, not the object (and this explains why the building of the name, the brand, absorbs nearly all the efforts of the companies, if compared to the productive aspect of the articles to be branded).

   So, what I am suggesting here is that we can identify the phenomenon of branding behind the concentration in the distribution of visitors among Italian museums: people choose the museums according, not to their content, (or the 'product' they offer) but to their 'name'. The Uffizi, the Colosseum, or Pompeii are brand-names that act as powerful attractors, seizing for themselves the vast majority of 'consumers'/ visitors.

   The fact that the element of attraction is their name and not their content is well illustrated by some 'minimal pairs', that is to say, pairs of museums that differ minimally in their offer but greatly in their demand.

   For example, Pompeii and Herculaneum differ minimally for a common visitor wanting to see a Roman city of the first century destroyed and frozen in time by a volcanic eruption. Nonetheless, the visitor aims at the name, and Pompeii is a well known trademark, while Herculaneum is not.

   As a result, Pompeii has about ten times the visitors of Herculaneum, exactly as an Adidas or Nike shoe has dozens of times more 'wearers' than a shoe of an unknown brand, no matter if they have the same technical quality.

   In the field of cultural heritage, though, this branding effect has very serious implications unknown to the other sectors, since cultural assets are not commodities to sell or to give away as a gift. Well, they are not commodities at all.

   The specific value of cultural assets lies in their being bearers of culture and, as such, fundamental vehicles for the building of the cultural identity of individuals, nations and humanity as a whole. This is why we tend to be very happy when museums become popular: it is not because it means that we are selling many tickets – as is the case with football stadiums – but because we assume that the visit will lead to an improvement in the value of the human person who is experiencing it. And this is exactly the reason why we take school classes to museums and not to stadiums.

   However, this reasoning is based on the assumption that the visit to the museum will generate that phenomenon of 'cultural transmission' which is at the core of this process of improvement. But the fact that the huge increase in visitors is driven by the name of the museum, by its brand, seriously puts into question this assumption, because it shows that these visits are not based on the museum content. And they are not based on the content because the visitor is not in a condition to understand or appreciate it.

   The average visitor, in fact, cannot evaluate the content of a museum going beyond very general concepts (like 'antique', 'Renaissance', 'Roman', etc.) because he or she does not have the conceptual tools necessary to gain access to the cultural message.

   The result we sadly witness is the one invariably reported by the 'museum visitors’ studies' that try to analyse the effects of the visit in terms of cultural transmission: whatever the measure small, very small, nearly of no importance. Often it is hard to find something that persists in the memory of the visitors even just after the experience (aside from curiosities).

   Cultural objects speak to those who are able to understand their language, that is, to those who master their language and possess the knowledge understanding their messages presupposes. But these two conditions are very difficult to be found in the vast panorama of those who nowadays visit museums.

   This code and this knowledge are no longer part of that background, that once, we could take for granted in the visitors. However, while visitors have changed – and especially the composition of the vast majority of them has changed – the museums have not. As a result, now there is now a huge gap between what the museum exhibition requires for the cultural communication to occur, and the actual skills possessed by those who represent the target of this communication.

   If the museum has to carry out its tasks as a public cultural institution, it must fill this gap. Unfortunately, this is not a very easy task. The building of interpretative tools really capable of working is an endeavor far from being obvious. We just need to watch the attempts of some  museums in this direction to understand how difficult this is.

   In these cases, in fact, the tendency is often that of filling the museums with texts: wall panels, enormous captions and leaflets in every room. In short, a veritable verbal flood. After all, this is the most candid and simplest idea: providing the visitor with the knowledge and information needed to understand the exhibit in an explicit way, verbally, like in textbooks.

   Yes, but just as we know well from school, it is very difficult to assimilate concepts offered in this way. At school, in fact, to achieve this goal we have to study, and studying is a strenuous activity which requires a high degree of attention and concentration, no distractions, and above all a strong motivation (internal or external) to do it. None of these conditions occurs in a museum, while standing in front of a work of art. We lack both the cognitive and the motivational premises.

   This road precluded, which incidentally is the only one accessible to the qualification and training of the 'average' museum curator, it is easy to understand that the task is much more difficult. We must find other means, less verbal and more visual, avoid all those explicit formulations that require to be 'studied', and find some ways to arouse and foster attention and motivation.

   It is difficult, yes, but not impossible: we have to put together different kinds of expertise, such as those of communication experts, storytellers, directors, multimedia graphic designers, to name a few – all figures that abound in the real world – and work closely with them. But this does not happen. Why?

   The justification most frequently advanced is always the same. It would be nice, but how can we do it? There is no money. Well, it must be said very clearly that this is not true.

   In general, yes, there is little money, but when money is found and beyond that needed for indispensable measures like restoration and maintenance, it is systematically used for new furniture, the remaking of showcases, expensive (and very often unnecessary) new lighting systems, often signed by some well-known architect, and so on.

   In short, it is invariably used to embellish the museum and never to enhance  cultural transmission. The truth is that as long as it comes to spending for things that do not affect the traditional structure and way of operating of the museum, even if only for accessories, the money is always raised. On the contrary, if the proposal involves some change in these fundamental aspects, then there is no money. At best, it is only possible to change the labels, and with big efforts.

   We must be aware that all this is not related to money at all. It is only an excuse behind which one can entrench, glimpsing a potential danger. And this danger is precisely that change in the structure and operations of the museum that a communicative approach would require. Museum curators are fundamentally hostile to any change of this nature, and this is the essential reason why nothing ever happens, regardless all the evident problems and their equally evident solutions.

   The point is that they consciously or unconsciously want to firmly preserve the actual function of the museum exhibition, a function that is not designed to ease or even allow the cultural transmission: a function that is not that of restoring the communication circuit between the works of art and the public who visit them.

   Since their creation in the second half of the eighteenth century, in fact, museums have maintained an organisation reserved entirely for the insiders (or to those who, more or less amateurishly, can identify with them). The exhibition structure of a museum is designed to allow the critical study of the works of art, not the understanding of their communicative message. After all, curators themselves do admit it openly when they get a sense of the situation.

   “The paintings had specific relations to the church or the palace for which they were created, and had the task of transmitting those specific messages that had been selected before their creation. In the museum, they were put close to and compared with other paintings, and prompted to express mainly the historical-artistic paths identified by those who studied them, art historians, connoisseurs, museum directors; and from that moment on, in their arrangement they have mirrored the state of affairs of the specialized studies.” (A. Mottola Molfino, Il libro dei musei, Torino, Allemandi 1992, p. 45)

   The current organisation of the museum asks the visitor to become a small art historian or a critic, that is to say, to be an expert in history and art criticism, and, of course, it assumes that the visitor is able to decode and understand by him or herself the exhibits, without any help.

   On the contrary, if we want a museum that fosters and facilitates the communicative functions of the single work of art, we must radically change this organisation, starting from the number of the exhibits. In fact, the overcrowding typical of museums is very useful to the comparison of many different works of art – a comparison which is the core of every critical or evolutionary discourse – but it is very bad for the understanding of the message conveyed by the single exhibit.

   In fact, it generates confusion, loss of attention, difficulty of identification, and so on. Thus, it should be drastically reduced. Then, we must change the arrangement: the combinations of works of art should help people to understand their message rather than to allow a stylistic comparison between them; they should focus on the 'content' and not on the 'form'. Finally, the exhibits – every single exhibit we want to be understood – should be accompanied by 'dramatic' (and not 'didactic') reconstructive and explanatory devices.

   In this way we would have an extremely different kind of museum, both conceptually and physically. Most of all, in this way we would ask those who preside over museums to stop using them as exclusive mirrors of their expertise, that is, mirrors of the historical-critical study of the exhibits: in other words, to stop using them as a means of confrontation within the clique of the insiders.

   But this, as it is easy to see, is like asking them to commit career suicide: through the museum exhibition a curator can vie with his or her peers on the ground of critical studies. How could he or she lower him or herself to a confrontation based on the very different (and probably completely devoid of interest for him or her) ground of the successful communication with the general public?

   Bear in mind that this contradiction is the real core of the problem. The matter isn’t not knowing what to do, or not having the money to do something; everybody knows that there are people able to do what is needed and that there would be the money to do it (it would be enough to spend a little less in furniture). The point is that this kind of change will never occur as long as the museums are under the exclusive jurisdiction of the current figures of curators.

   And this happens not because they are not able to do so, but because they do not want to; if necessary, they will fight fiercely and die hard to maintain the status quo. We must stress this point: for what concerns curators, museums are not designed for the general public, but for them, their colleagues and those who can equate to them.

   And so? So it is clear that the only possible solution must be a political and not a technical action. But this requires a strategic statement of our position regarding those aspects we consider to be the interest and the priority tasks of a public institution.

   If we decide that museums’ role as cultural vehicles is the fundamental reason that justifies their opening to the public, and that this public – the real people that actually ask to go and visit museums, not the fake public suited to insiders’ private use – has the right to be and feel evaluated and respected in its fundamental rights, being the primary subsidizer of the museums, then we must have the courage to remove the main obstacle on our road: it is necessary to remove from the current museum curators the exclusive jurisdiction over what is related to the public exhibition.

Translated by Diana Mengo

 

 

 

The situation of the museums in Italy is very different from that in the rest of Europe, and this is due to historical reasons of various nature (many of which are mirrored by the improper expression “the country with the richest cultural heritage in the world”).

In the other countries the works of art are far fewer and gathered in a dozen or so of historic museums – not to mention the enormous difference existing between the number and richness of the archaeological sites in Italy compared to the rest of Europe.


IN BRIEF

  • People choose the museums according to their name, not to their content
     
  • The specific value of cultural assets lies in their being bearers of culture and vehicles for the building of the cultural identity
     
  • The exhibition structure of a museum is designed to allow the critical study of the works of art, not the understanding of their communicative message

Though to the majority of people the state of affairs of Italian museums (using the term in a broad sense, to include monuments, painting and sculpture galleries, archaeological sites, and so on) appears to be very prosperous, showing in the last fifteeen years an average increase in the number of visitors of 3.5% per year, when we take a closer look at it, we see that this success is only superficial, hiding a situation that is rather critical.

The telltale sign of this state of affairs is the distribution of the rising tide of visitors. Some figures will help us to clarify the point. Of the approximately 40 million people who in 2013 visited the 423 Italian state museums, a half crowded into only 11 of the museums.

This means that 50% of visitors were absorbed by 5% of the museums, while 412 museums had to share the other half of the public. And this is not all. Three quarters of all visitors – approximately 30 million people – were distributed among only 36 museums (that is, 8% of the total).

Finally, 90% of all the visitors were distributed among 99 museums, 23% of the total. This means that less than a quarter of the Italian state museums absorbed almost all the visitors, while 324 museums (423 – 99) had virtually no public.

Things look even more drastic if we consider all the Italian museums, and not only the state ones. Thus, the overall picture is of 4588 museums (more than ten times the number of the state ones) with 104 million visitors.

Here, 43.3% of the visitors were absorbed by the first 36 museums, which amounts to less than 1% of the total (to be exact, they are 0.8%). A 69% of the public visited 3.6% of the museums and 92% – once again, almost all of the public – visited 22% of the museums, which leaves 3579 museums virtually without visitors.

The dimension of this concentration is so vast that it appears immediately clear it cannot have any 'objective' cause. In other words, it cannot lie in the nature, the quality or the quantity of the artefacts of the different museums. To use the language of economics, it is a scenario of oligopoly: a few manufacturers/suppliers seize the majority of the demand and leave the several other manufacturers/suppliers only marginal shares of it.

There are many reasons why a market gives rise to an oligopolistic condition, one of which is particularly interesting for our discussion. I am referring to the phenomenon of 'branding', when the success of an item is determined not so much by its material constitution, but by its 'name'.

The markets characterised by 'designer' articles, like those of sport brands, from t-shirts to shoes and equipment (skis, bikes, etc.) are typical examples: the product differences existing between articles belonging to the same category are small (if not minimal) and definitely not proportional to the difference in their demands and resulting success, which, on the contrary, is huge.

In short, all this occurs because people choose the name, not the object (and this explains why the building of the name, the brand, absorbs nearly all the efforts of the companies, if compared to the productive aspect of the articles to be branded).

So, what I am suggesting here is that we can identify the phenomenon of branding behind the concentration in the distribution of visitors among Italian museums: people choose the museums according, not to their content, (or the 'product' they offer) but to their 'name'. The Uffizi, the Colosseum, or Pompeii are brand-names that act as powerful attractors, seizing for themselves the vast majority of 'consumers'/ visitors.

The fact that the element of attraction is their name and not their content is well illustrated by some 'minimal pairs', that is to say, pairs of museums that differ minimally in their offer but greatly in their demand.

For example, Pompeii and Herculaneum differ minimally for a common visitor wanting to see a Roman city of the first century destroyed and frozen in time by a volcanic eruption. Nonetheless, the visitor aims at the name, and Pompeii is a well known trademark, while Herculaneum is not.

As a result, Pompeii has about ten times the visitors of Herculaneum, exactly as an Adidas or Nike shoe has dozens of times more 'wearers' than a shoe of an unknown brand, no matter if they have the same technical quality.

In the field of cultural heritage, though, this branding effect has very serious implications unknown to the other sectors, since cultural assets are not commodities to sell or to give away as a gift. Well, they are not commodities at all.

The specific value of cultural assets lies in their being bearers of culture and, as such, fundamental vehicles for the building of the cultural identity of individuals, nations and humanity as a whole. This is why we tend to be very happy when museums become popular: it is not because it means that we are selling many tickets – as is the case with football stadiums – but because we assume that the visit will lead to an improvement in the value of the human person who is experiencing it. And this is exactly the reason why we take school classes to museums and not to stadiums.

However, this reasoning is based on the assumption that the visit to the museum will generate that phenomenon of 'cultural transmission' which is at the core of this process of improvement. But the fact that the huge increase in visitors is driven by the name of the museum, by its brand, seriously puts into question this assumption, because it shows that these visits are not based on the museum content. And they are not based on the content because the visitor is not in a condition to understand or appreciate it.

The average visitor, in fact, cannot evaluate the content of a museum going beyond very general concepts (like 'antique', 'Renaissance', 'Roman', etc.) because he or she does not have the conceptual tools necessary to gain access to the cultural message.

The result we sadly witness is the one invariably reported by the 'museum visitors’ studies' that try to analyse the effects of the visit in terms of cultural transmission: whatever the measure small, very small, nearly of no importance. Often it is hard to find something that persists in the memory of the visitors even just after the experience (aside from curiosities).


Cultural objects speak to those who are able to understand their language, that is, to those who master their language and possess the knowledge understanding their messages presupposes. But these two conditions are very difficult to be found in the vast panorama of those who nowadays visit museums.

This code and this knowledge are no longer part of that background, that once, we could take for granted in the visitors. However, while visitors have changed – and especially the composition of the vast majority of them has changed – the museums have not. As a result, now there is now a huge gap between what the museum exhibition requires for the cultural communication to occur, and the actual skills possessed by those who represent the target of this communication.

If the museum has to carry out its tasks as a public cultural institution, it must fill this gap. Unfortunately, this is not a very easy task. The building of interpretative tools really capable of working is an endeavor far from being obvious. We just need to watch the attempts of some  museums in this direction to understand how difficult this is.

In these cases, in fact, the tendency is often that of filling the museums with texts: wall panels, enormous captions and leaflets in every room. In short, a veritable verbal flood. After all, this is the most candid and simplest idea: providing the visitor with the knowledge and information needed to understand the exhibit in an explicit way, verbally, like in textbooks.

Yes, but just as we know well from school, it is very difficult to assimilate concepts offered in this way. At school, in fact, to achieve this goal we have to study, and studying is a strenuous activity which requires a high degree of attention and concentration, no distractions, and above all a strong motivation (internal or external) to do it. None of these conditions occurs in a museum, while standing in front of a work of art. We lack both the cognitive and the motivational premises.

This road precluded, which incidentally is the only one accessible to the qualification and training of the 'average' museum curator, it is easy to understand that the task is much more difficult. We must find other means, less verbal and more visual, avoid all those explicit formulations that require to be 'studied', and find some ways to arouse and foster attention and motivation.

It is difficult, yes, but not impossible: we have to put together different kinds of expertise, such as those of communication experts, storytellers, directors, multimedia graphic designers, to name a few – all figures that abound in the real world – and work closely with them. But this does not happen. Why?

The justification most frequently advanced is always the same. It would be nice, but how can we do it? There is no money. Well, it must be said very clearly that this is not true.

In general, yes, there is little money, but when money is found and beyond that needed for indispensable measures like restoration and maintenance, it is systematically used for new furniture, the remaking of showcases, expensive (and very often unnecessary) new lighting systems, often signed by some well-known architect, and so on.

In short, it is invariably used to embellish the museum and never to enhance  cultural transmission. The truth is that as long as it comes to spending for things that do not affect the traditional structure and way of operating of the museum, even if only for accessories, the money is always raised. On the contrary, if the proposal involves some change in these fundamental aspects, then there is no money. At best, it is only possible to change the labels, and with big efforts.

We must be aware that all this is not related to money at all. It is only an excuse behind which one can entrench, glimpsing a potential danger. And this danger is precisely that change in the structure and operations of the museum that a communicative approach would require. Museum curators are fundamentally hostile to any change of this nature, and this is the essential reason why nothing ever happens, regardless all the evident problems and their equally evident solutions.

The point is that they consciously or unconsciously want to firmly preserve the actual function of the museum exhibition, a function that is not designed to ease or even allow the cultural transmission: a function that is not that of restoring the communication circuit between the works of art and the public who visit them.

Since their creation in the second half of the eighteenth century, in fact, museums have maintained an organisation reserved entirely for the insiders (or to those who, more or less amateurishly, can identify with them). The exhibition structure of a museum is designed to allow the critical study of the works of art, not the understanding of their communicative message. After all, curators themselves do admit it openly when they get a sense of the situation.

“The paintings had specific relations to the church or the palace for which they were created, and had the task of transmitting those specific messages that had been selected before their creation. In the museum, they were put close to and compared with other paintings, and prompted to express mainly the historical-artistic paths identified by those who studied them, art historians, connoisseurs, museum directors; and from that moment on, in their arrangement they have mirrored the state of affairs of the specialized studies.” (A. Mottola Molfino, Il libro dei musei, Torino, Allemandi 1992, p. 45)

The current organisation of the museum asks the visitor to become a small art historian or a critic, that is to say, to be an expert in history and art criticism, and, of course, it assumes that the visitor is able to decode and understand by him or herself the exhibits, without any help.

On the contrary, if we want a museum that fosters and facilitates the communicative functions of the single work of art, we must radically change this organisation, starting from the number of the exhibits. In fact, the overcrowding typical of museums is very useful to the comparison of many different works of art – a comparison which is the core of every critical or evolutionary discourse – but it is very bad for the understanding of the message conveyed by the single exhibit.

In fact, it generates confusion, loss of attention, difficulty of identification, and so on. Thus, it should be drastically reduced. Then, we must change the arrangement: the combinations of works of art should help people to understand their message rather than to allow a stylistic comparison between them; they should focus on the 'content' and not on the 'form'. Finally, the exhibits – every single exhibit we want to be understood – should be accompanied by 'dramatic' (and not 'didactic') reconstructive and explanatory devices.

In this way we would have an extremely different kind of museum, both conceptually and physically. Most of all, in this way we would ask those who preside over museums to stop using them as exclusive mirrors of their expertise, that is, mirrors of the historical-critical study of the exhibits: in other words, to stop using them as a means of confrontation within the clique of the insiders.

But this, as it is easy to see, is like asking them to commit career suicide: through the museum exhibition a curator can vie with his or her peers on the ground of critical studies. How could he or she lower him or herself to a confrontation based on the very different (and probably completely devoid of interest for him or her) ground of the successful communication with the general public?

Bear in mind that this contradiction is the real core of the problem. The matter isn’t not knowing what to do, or not having the money to do something; everybody knows that there are people able to do what is needed and that there would be the money to do it (it would be enough to spend a little less in furniture). The point is that this kind of change will never occur as long as the museums are under the exclusive jurisdiction of the current figures of curators.

And this happens not because they are not able to do so, but because they do not want to; if necessary, they will fight fiercely and die hard to maintain the status quo. We must stress this point: for what concerns curators, museums are not designed for the general public, but for them, their colleagues and those who can equate to them.

And so? So it is clear that the only possible solution must be a political and not a technical action. But this requires a strategic statement of our position regarding those aspects we consider to be the interest and the priority tasks of a public institution.

If we decide that museums’ role as cultural vehicles is the fundamental reason that justifies their opening to the public, and that this public – the real people that actually ask to go and visit museums, not the fake public suited to insiders’ private use – has the right to be and feel evaluated and respected in its fundamental rights, being the primary subsidizer of the museums, then we must have the courage to remove the main obstacle on our road: it is necessary to remove from the current museum curators the exclusive jurisdiction over what is related to the public exhibition.

Translated by Diana Mengo

- See more at: http://www.eutopiamagazine.eu/en/francesco-antinucci/issue/exclusivity-museums-and-hegemony-curators-italian-case#sthash.KjzslmyX.dpuf

   Wieder einmal jährt sich der 20. Juli, nun zum 71. Mal.

   Es war ein warmer Tag in diesem tragischen Jahr 1944. Deutschlands Städte lagen bereits grossteils in Trümmern, an allen Fronten gab das deutsche Militär dem Druck der Feinde nach. Doch die Wirtschaft funktionierte noch, trotz Engpässen. Die Fliegerangriffe waren tägliche Routine geworden: wir Schulkinder warfen uns in den Strassengraben, wenn auf dem Heimweg von der Schule die Jagdbomber über uns flogen auf der Suche nach einem Ziel für die Bomben, deren Abwurf die starke Flakabwehr der Herrmann-Göring-Werke in Linz verhindert hatte.

   Noch glaubte das Regime an die kommende "Wunderwaffe",  die -- stärker als V1 und V2 -- das Kriegsglück wenden würde. Goebbels predigte den "totalen Krieg", der für mich darin bestand, dass ich als zehnjähriger Pimpf in das "Gauschulungslager Nussdorf am Attersee" abkommandiert wurde, wo mir paramilitärische Ausbildung im Kommissstil zuteil werden sollte.

   In diese Wochen platzte die Nachricht vom Attentat.  Main Vater kannte etliche der Attentäter, ein entfernter Verwandter war darunter. Er war nicht überrascht, denn man hatte ihn Monate zuvor gefragt, ob er mitmachen wolle. Ein Ministeramt sei ihm in Aussicht gestellt worden. Er lehnte ab mit den Worten: "Diese Leute sind Amateure, das Attentat wird schiefgehen."  Nicht heldenhaft, aber realistisch. Er sollte leider Recht behalten.

   Das Land versank immer tiefer in Paranoia. Die Nächte waren schwarz, denn die Fenster mussten verdunkelt sein, um dem Bombern kein Ziel abzugeben. Finstere Gestalten auf Plakaten mahnten, beispielsweise "Kohlenklau" mit einem Sack auf dem Rücken, oder "Feind hört mit!"  Das Volk freute sich, dass Hitler das Attentat überlebt hatte und verlangte den Tod für die Attentäter. Richter Freisler lieferte in Radio und Wochenschau das Gewünschte.

   Wir lebten zwar in diesen Monaten fern von Berlin, doch das bot keinen Schutz. Die  Gestapo kam, um meinen Vater zu verhören. Wie es denn käme, dass er so viele der Attentäter und Männer ihres Umfelds kenne?  Vor allem wollten sie wissen, ob er den flüchtigen Albrecht Haushofer verstecke. Er verneinte und sie zogen wieder ab ohne ihn mitzunehmen, denn sie sahen, dass er krank und nicht transportfähig war.

   So verbrachte ich zwei Wochen im August in Nussdorf am Attersee, lernte Exerzieren, Kleinkaliberschiessen, Ballistik und Panzerfaustbedienung. Und die Verwendung von DDT gegen Flöhe.

Heinrich von Loesch

 

   Am schlimmen Ende der Ära Berlusconi in Italien zeichnete der Karikaturist Bucchi einen nachdenklichen Mann, der sagt:  "Ci vuole un secolo di occupazione straniera"  --  "Wir brauchen ein Jahrhundert fremde Besatzung."

   An diesem Punkt ist Griechenland angelangt.  Die fremde Besatzung ist angekündigt, für fünf Jahre. Griechenland muss sie noch akzeptieren. Nach jahrelangem Hickhack ist die Wahrheit endlich auf dem Tisch: da Hellas sich nicht selbst reformieren kann und will, muss die Reformarbeit von den Gläubigern erzwungen und kontrolliert werden.

   Peinlich für eine souveräne Nation, aber unumgänglich, so man nicht den Absturz in das schon fast vergessene Armutsniveau der 1970er Jahre vermeiden will.

   Alles Jammern und Schimpfen ist sinnlos. Griechenland kann von Glück reden, dass seine Gläubiger ihm prinzipiell wohlgesonnen sind, eine Eselsgeduld mit unfähigen und unwilligen Regierungen gezeigt haben, zu erheblichen finanziellen Opfern bereit sind und sich wie ein Schneekönig freuen würden, falls es ihnen gelänge, mit Hilfe der Troika Hellas in ein paar Jahren leidlich auf die Beine zu stellen.

   Die Fachleute, die nun Griechenland bei seiner Modernisierung steuern sollen, stehen auf den Gehaltslisten der Gläubiger.  Das ist ein nicht zu unterschätzendes Geschenk, das die Hellenen honorieren sollten, anstatt über Fremdbestimmung zu klagen. Nichts anderes als ein Jahrhundertwerk steht an: eine Chance für Griechenland, im Schnellverfahren aus dem 19. ins 21. Jahrhundert katapultiert zu werden.

   Natürlich wird es schmerzlich sein, die alte orientalische Schlamperei und Gemütlichkeit zu verlieren. Ein Weltbild, ein Lebenszuschnitt müssen sich ändern.  Was die Eltern den Kindern mitteilen und tradieren können, wird wertlos; alte Autoritäten zerbrechen, neue fordern Respekt.

   Besonders hart ist der Abstieg für eine Generation, die in Wohlstand aufgewachsen ist, für die reichliche Renten (auch für unverheiratete Töchter), mit frühem Verrentungsalter und 14 Monaten pro Jahr ebenso selbstverständlich waren wie Schulbusse, billige Hypotheken und Autokauf auf Raten. Vergessen die Zeit, in der Griechen nach Deutschland gingen, eine deutsche Frau heirateten um Wohnrecht zu bekommen und mit einem Auto samt deutschen Nummernschild wieder nach Griechenland zurückzukehren.  

   Fraglos kommen harte Jahre auf Griechenland zu, aber auch interessante und chancenreiche. In seiner Misere sollte Hellas dankbar sein, dass Europa ihm die Hand hält und es auf dem Weg in die Moderne unterstützt. Dabei sollte Europa freilich bescheiden bleiben, denn an der Katastrophe Griechenlands ist es nicht ganz unschuldig.

Ihsan al-Tawil

Update

Griechenlands erneute Rettung beeindruckt Deutsche offenbar wenig. Auf Focus online forderten 9 von je 10 Lesern bei einer Umfrage, Deutschland solle Griechenland kein weiteres Geld geben.

   If Ukraine's east is a combustive mix of languages and loyalties, its west can be even trickier. In Transcarpathia, many residents live within shouting distance of four EU countries. Inhabitants speak not only Russian and Ukrainian but Hungarian, Romanian, German, Slovak and Rusyn. Many of its 1.3 million inhabitants hold more than one passport.
 
   It's a region, in short, where loyalties don't necessarily lie with Kyiv. So when armed violence broke out on July 11 between police and Right Sector nationalists in the Transcarpathian city of Mukacheve, it was an eerie echo of the Kremlin's insistence that Ukraine's problem is not outside meddling, but internal strife.
 
   "[The Right Sector] has a thousands-strong military wing and its own command, but it does not report to the government," the pro-government news channel Russia Today stated in its coverage of the Mukhacheve shoot-out, which left two people dead and several more wounded.
 
   Sputnik International, a second Kremlin-backed outlet, ran articles describing Right Sector militants running amok, lowering EU flags in Lviv, hacking the Twitter account of the National Security and Defense Council , and heading en masse toward Kyiv.

 

A member of Right Sector attends a rally in Kyiv on July 12.
                               A member of Right Sector attends a rally in Kyiv on July 12.
 

   Right Sector -- a heavily armed militant organization branded by Russia as "neo-Nazis" and "fascists" for their ties to World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera, who cooperated with German forces to fend off Soviet troops -- is estimated to have as many as 10,000 members serving in volunteer battalions in the Donbas war zone and elsewhere in the country.
 
   A sometimes uneasy ally of last year's Maidan protesters, the group has since grown critical of the government of Petro Poroshenko, in particular for cracking down on volunteer units. But one member, while confirming the group's intention to protest in Kyiv, said they would not do so "with assault rifles and machine guns."
 
   The group has also sought to portray the weekend violence as fallout from the group's self-described anticorruption efforts. Oleksiy Byk, a Right Sector spokesman, said police were to blame for the bloodshed. "If we had started shooting first, there would have been many police among the victims," Byk said during a July 12 press conference.

 

Dmytro Yarosh         Dmytro Yarosh
 

   Dmytro Yarosh, the head of Right Sector, said on Facebook that his group was cooperating with the Ukrainian Security Service to stabilize the situation in Transcarpathia.
 
   "I am asking you to ignore fake reports, which are disseminated to discredit Right Sector and provoke Ukrainians to shed blood," he said. Poroshenko, addressing an extraordinary meeting of the National Security Council's military cabinet, appeared unswayed. Accusing Right Sector of undermining "real Ukrainian patriots," the Ukrainian leader on July 13 suggested that fresh tensions in Donbas "have been mysteriously synchronized with an attempt to destabilize the situation in the rear -- and not just any rear, but in a place 1,000 kilometers away from the front line."

 
A KGB Favorite
 
   Local reports suggest the Mukhacheve violence may have been the result of a business dispute. Cross-border smuggling of cigarettes and other contraband is said to be worth billions of dollars in Transcarpathia, with its easy ground access to Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland.

   The region's customs officials have been suspended in the wake of the violence, and at least one authority -- parliamentary deputy Mykhaylo Lanyo, who has been accused of ties to smuggling networks -- has been called in for questioning.
 
   But it remains to be seen whether suspicions will trickle up to powerful local authorities like the so-called Baloha clan -- revolving around Viktor Baloha, a former emergency situations minister and current parliamentary deputy -- which is said to rule Transcarpathia with near-complete autonomy. Some observers have suggested that the July 11 violence was little more than a battle for influence between Lan and Baloha.

 
   Others say they suspect Russia of stirring the pot. During the Soviet era, Transcarpathia -- with its mix of languages and nearby borders -- was of special interest for the KGB, who used the region as a "window" to the west and the entryway for its armed invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

 

   In an opinion piece for RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, analyst Petro Kralyuk said little has changed since the Soviet collapse.

"The FSB has successfully picked up the baton," he wrote. "For Russia, Transcarpathia and its surroundings remain an important region. Taking into account the blurred identity and ethnic diversity of the local population, the field of activities for these agents is quite fertile."
 
   The weekend unrest, with its threat of gang-style violence spilling over the EU's eastern border, has put Ukraine's goal of visa-free EU travel at immediate risk. With the involvement of Right Sector, Kralyuk says, the clashes have given Russia "a wonderful gift."
 
Special Deal
 
   Transcarpathia, which during the 20th century was alternately ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary before being claimed by the Soviet Union, leans heavily on largesse from its western neighbors.
 
    Budapest in particular has provided passports and special benefits to residents with proven Hungarian roots. The country's pro-Russian prime minister, Viktor Orban, has set Ukraine on edge with professed concern for Transcarpathia's Hungarian minority, which many see as shorthand for a Russian-style separatist conflict.
 
   Moreover, the region has long shown an affinity for pro-Russian parties. In the 1990s, Transcarpathia was a solid supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Viktor Medvedchuk, the pro-Kremlin strategist with close personal ties to Vladimir Putin. Before the Maidan protests, it put its weight behind Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions, rather than pro-democratic "orange" candidates.
 
   Political analyst Viktoria Podhorna says government negligence has only added to Transcarpathian exceptionalism. Poroshenko, who earned atypical support from Baloha, appears to have responded by involving himself only minimally in Transcarpathian issues.
 
   "There's some kind of trade-off between the central government and regional authorities, who are basically owned by local princelings," Podhorna says. "And this is the foundation that can lead to conflicts like those in Donbas."

Dmytro Shurkhalo, Daisy Sindelar -- Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty

 

   Hard times in Moldova are prompting some Moldovans to warm to the idea of unification with neighboring Romania.

   On July 5, thousands of Moldovans, carrying Romanian flags, marched in the Moldovan capital, Chișinău, voicing a preference that Moldova, a predominantly ethnic Romanian country that signed an integration agreement with the EU last year, give up on independence and join Romania, which is already a member of the EU and NATO.

   “We tried to change the political elite, from communist to democratic, we tried to ‘move away’ from the East and get closer to the West, but, nonetheless, the degree of citizens’ dissatisfaction has reached its peak,” commented 25-year-old Elena Podoleanu, a demonstrator from Chișinău. “Corruption, bureaucracy, the political class’ lack of a spine will never allow Moldova to be a developed country as is the case with the Baltic states.” (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, three tiny former Soviet republics, now are EU and NATO members.)

   Moldova over the past year has been hard hit economically and politically — especially by a scandal over banking fraud that cost taxpayers billions of dollars and highlighted rampant corruption in the judicial system. Accused of doing nothing to respond to the crisis, Chiril Gaburici resigned as prime minister in June after prosecutors questioned him about the validity of his university degree.

   The government touts some economic improvements since the EU deal – a 64.6 percent increase in exports to the EU for the first six months of this year, lower foreign debt and a 4.8 percent jump in GDP. But the July 5 march participants, including 67-year-old Anastasia Fuior, are not impressed with the government statistics.

   “In 24 years of independence, Moldova had a chance to show that it can be a functional state,” said Fuior, a resident of Cahul, 175 kilometers south from Chișinău, near the Romanian border. “That meant that citizens have confidence in the justice system, young women and men can benefit from a good education, a developed economy, a high level of social welfare, conditions that Moldova does not receive from its independence.”

   The desire for union with Romania stems from Moldova’s own history.

   The Russian Empire wrested the territory now known as Moldova from Ottoman control in 1812, and made it part of its possessions as Bessarabia. Romania, on the western side of the Prut River, remained under Ottoman suzerainty. In 1918, after the collapse of the Russian Empire, Romania and Bessarabia united, but the union did not last long. The Soviet Union in 1940 occupied Bessarabia and additional territory to block Nazi-allied Romania. The Soviet republic of Moldova was born.

   Initiatives to reunite with Romania have existed since 1991, but have never gained traction. Activists these days readily admit that unification will not happen soon, but say Moldova’s problems offer no other choice than to pursue it.

   “The only solution now is union,” stressed Vitalie Prisăcaru, one of the organizers of the July 5 event. “Only by union can we go forward.”

   Hundreds of activists are literally doing just that: walking by foot from Chișinău to the Romanian capital, Bucharest, a distance of roughly 488 kilometers, or about a six-and-a-half-hour drive.

   On July 12, the marchers expect to reach Bucharest and, with their Romanian supporters, said Civic Youth Movement President Anatol Ursu, one of the Moldovan participants, “will go to Cotroceni Palace to ask the Romanian President Klaus Johannis to accelerate the process of reunification.”

   “Bessarabia’s place is in Europe,” commented Aurelian Mihai, a Romanian MP who attended the Chișinău gathering. “Bessarabia’s place is in Romanian history and always will be.”

   So far, neither Romania nor Moldova’s government has expressed a public position on the July 5 protesters’ appeal. Romanian media, however, provided heavy coverage of the July 5 gathering, which, officials estimated, a few thousand Romanians attended.

   One former Moldovan president, Vladimir Voronin, has sharply condemned the march to Romania. In a letter to European Parliament President Martin Schulz, released on July 7, Voronin accused Bucharest of fomenting “the destruction and annexation of Moldova.”

   “The Moldovan people will fight to strengthen Moldova's statehood,” Voronin wrote. “Moreover, your carelessness [in reference to European institutions] toward my country can have unpredictable consequences,” he predicted.

   That, in particular, could mean Russia.

   Russian politicians and officials recently have charged that Moldova blocks their dispatch of alleged peacekeeping troops to Transnistria, a breakaway Moldovan region dependent on Russian aid. Any indication that Moldova is tiptoeing toward merger with a NATO member state would heighten that alarm.

   Unionists, working within a National Unity Bloc of 22 non-governmental organizations, say they recognize that Transnistria poses an obstacle for their plans.

   Yet many of Moldova’s ethnic Russians, roughly six percent of the population of over 3.5 million, also are indignant about the yearning for Romania.

   Fifty-eight-year-old Chișinău resident Svetlana Macari, saying in Russian that she speaks “Moldovan” rather than “Romanian,” termed the marchers “children” pursuing an impossible “dream.”

   Igor Dodon, leader of the country’s largest opposition party, the influential Moscow-friendly Socialist Party, has denounced the government’s silence toward what he described as “officials and representatives of right-wing extremist, nationalist and neo-Nazi” groups from Romania who attended the July 5 gathering.

   Moscow and its supporters similarly have claimed that neo-Nazi sympathizers are also active in neighboring Ukraine.

   Despite the criticism, activists remain upbeat. “Union will certainly take place, like in 1918, with flowers and hora [a traditional Romanian dance], where Romanians will dance on both sides of the Prut,” predicted Ursu.

Eurasianet